


is something burning?

by escapismandsharpobjects



Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Fire, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Whump, Whumptober 2020, heat exhaustion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:14:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27017113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escapismandsharpobjects/pseuds/escapismandsharpobjects
Summary: whumptober day 14 - prompt: fire, heat exhaustion. eddie feels bad but brushes it off, which proves to be a mistake.
Relationships: Eddie Diaz & Henrietta "Hen" Wilson, Evan "Buck" Buckley & Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 65
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	is something burning?

**Author's Note:**

> hey whats up!! im doing this very fast bc i have to go watch the amazing race w my family!! idk if any of yall watch it but we've been watching it for as long as i can remember and im so glad its finally back on. thats completely irrelevant but anyway. hope u enjoy this!!

It’s been a long day, and they’re only ten hours into their shift. Call after call, fire after fire. As soon as they’re back to the station, the alarm is ringing again. They’re all handling it in various ways, from Chim’s griping to Buck’s staring wistfully out the window of the truck as they rush to yet another accident. Eddie, though, feels he’s handling it far worse than the others.

Not because he’s being especially irritable about it, or snapping at anyone, or having any kind of emotional reaction to the seemingly neverending calls. He just feels  _ bad. _ If he didn’t know better, he’d say he felt feverish, but that wasn’t quite right. He’s sweaty, yes, weirdly thirsty, and tired, but he doesn’t feel sick. Just _...bad. _

He wonders, briefly, as they’re climbing into the truck to go to their second structure fire of the day, if it’s because of the heat. But he looks around at everyone else, and they all seem fine. Maybe a little tired and grumpy, but none of them look like how he feels. There’s no point in bringing it up, then, he figures. He’s not sick and they’re not feeling it. He can just ignore this, anyway. It’s not that bad, and he’s still got a lot of work ahead of him. He pushes the bad feeling to the side.

They arrive at the fire a minute later, and it’s a big one. Normally, they’d all be a little more excited about such a fire, but the stress of the day has worn on them, so that they all just do their jobs, with little conversation passing between them, something which suits Eddie just fine. He’s too tired to focus on anything but doing what he needs to do. 

The fire is in a small, one-story home, something which Eddie is deeply grateful for. No ladders to climb this time. The family that lives there is gathered safely outside, but looking considerably distressed. 

“You have to go in there and get Benny!” a little boy says to Eddie, running up to him as he’s pulling equipment off the truck.

“Who’s Benny?” Eddie asks, alarmed. There shouldn’t have been anyone still inside. 

“He’s our dog, he was hiding under the couch and we couldn’t get him out!” the boy responds tearfully. “Dad was going to go back to get him, but it was too hot. You have to save him!”

“I will,” Eddie promises, and hurries to relay this information to Bobby, who tells him to get the dog as quickly as he can so they can start with the hoses.

As Eddie enters the burning house, he feels briefly faint, stumbling over his feet for a second. As soon as the smoke engulfs him, though, the feeling fades, and everything unimportant goes away. 

He locates the dog quickly enough. He’s shivering and a little dusty, but seems otherwise unharmed. Eddie picks him up and carries him outside, setting him onto the grass and watching with a smile as he goes running up to the little boy.

He starts walking back to his team to help them extinguish the fire, but he doesn’t make it more than three steps before that faint feeling comes back, and his head starts to spin. A wave of nausea hits him all of a sudden, and he scrabbles to get his mask off. The second it’s away from his face, he turns to the side, thinking he’s going to be sick, but instead the faintness increases tenfold, the world spins rapidly around him, and he collapses to his knees on the grass, not unconscious but not fully present, shivering and sweating at the same time.

And then, there’s a cold hand on the back of his neck, and he flinches away from it, then leans back into it, not sure if he’s hot or cold. He hears voices talking above him, hears water being pumped from the hoses, but all of it blurs together so that he can’t pick out anything distinct. His head is spinning. He thinks he’d be lying on the ground if it weren’t for the hand on his neck and the other one on his chest, holding him up. 

Suddenly, the hand on his neck is moving, and then he feels someone undoing the zipper of his turnout coat and pulling it off of him. The first gust of hot air that hits his chest feels like the best thing in the world, and then the hand is back on the back of his neck, this time pressing something much cooler and much more wet into his skin. It drips down his back and makes him shudder, but whoever is holding it there doesn’t move it. 

He’s not sure of how long he stays like that, half out of it, with someone - multiple someones? - keeping him from collapsing, cooling him down. Eventually, though, his hearing clears up, and then Buck is talking to him, and Eddie thinks that he would really like to respond, but he is far too tired to even open his mouth.

Buck asks if he feels up to moving, and he shakes his head, wincing when it brings a brief wave of dizziness with it. 

“Can you drink some water, at least?” Buck asks, and Eddie nods, feeling suddenly as though he’s never been this thirsty in his life. 

Then there is a cool bottle being pressed into his hands, and he drinks half of it at record speed, only stopping when he nearly chokes. Someone takes the bottle from him, then, and presses another cool cloth to his forehead. He leans unconsciously into the touch, no longer shivering at the cold. 

Buck is speaking to him again, about nothing in particular, and he listens, slowly but surely feeling some of his strength come back, feeling some of the overwhelming heat leave his body. Finally, after what might be minutes but might just as easily be hours, he feels well enough to stand on shaky legs, nearly falling right back to his knees until Buck’s arm wraps around his shoulders. He leans heavily on the other man as they start walking - where to, he can’t tell. 

They stop after what feels like a mile, and then Buck is gently pushing him down onto something, and he recognizes, through his now mostly-cleared-up but still unfocused vision, that he’s in the back of the ambulance. He feels Buck sit down next to him, far enough away that none of his body heat is affecting Eddie, and then he feels someone else - Hen, he knows, instinctively - touch his forehead, and his cheeks, and his neck, and so on. She asks him how he’s feeling as she hands him another bottle of water, warning him to take it slow this time. 

He tells her he feels okay in between sips, which isn’t completely true considering he still feels like shit, but he certainly feels better than he had before, at any rate. 

“What happened?” he thinks to ask. 

“You almost passed out from heat exhaustion is what happened,” Buck says from next to him, sounding angry.

“Oh,” Eddie says, eloquently. 

Hen sighs. “Why didn’t you tell us, Eddie?” she asks. “You must’ve felt it coming on.”

Eddie shrugs halfheartedly. “Didn’t seem like a big deal. Nothing I couldn’t handle.” 

Buck scoffs. “Really, Eddie? You didn’t think  _ heat exhaustion _ was a big deal? People  _ die  _ from that.”

“Sorry,” Eddie mutters. “I really didn’t think anything was wrong. Not seriously, anyway. Didn’t feel sick. Just kinda bad.”

Now it’s Buck’s turn to sigh, his voice softening from that angry-yet-concerned tone. “Eds, you gotta tell us stuff like that. Even if you don’t think it’s important.”

“I’ll try,” Eddie says, knowing that he probably won’t. He’s just not that kind of person. He never has been. He keeps his problems to himself.

_ And then those problems overwhelm you, _ says a voice in the back of his head that he hates because he knows it’s right. 

He is spared the pain of having to think on that particular subject anymore by Buck’s hand coming to rest on his back, a presence that feels blissfully neither warm nor cold. 

“We’re a team, Eddie,” he says, like a promise. “We’re always here for you. You just have to let us be.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading!! hope you liked it and please let me know what you think!


End file.
